On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother - her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother - tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest...

"In this delectable sequel to The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux, a chef on the rise fuels her passion for cooking while enduring the hardest challenge she's ever faced: She's lost her sense of taste. Everybody wants a piece of grand chef Sophie Valroux. With her once-destroyed reputation fully recovered, Sophie is making her mark in the culinary world as the head chef at the Château de Champvert, the beautiful estate that she inherited...

A toddler finds out that spaghetti is yummy, but worms -- and blue crayons, and sand, and other things too gross to mention -- are definitely yucky when tasted.